Quick quiz: Who said, "Is this the time in our nation's history for our
federal government to ban Almighty God from our classrooms?" Or, "You will
search in vain for any reference to God or religion in the Democratic
platform"? Who lamented that "we permit the world's greatest collection of
smut to be freely available anywhere"? Who warned that, "We as a nation are
not far from the kind of moral decay that has brought on the fall of other
nations and people"?

You'll be forgiven if you picked any of the first three. But everybody knows
that Barry Goldwater wasn't that kind of conservative. Right?

That's certainly the way it seems these days. John Dean, a man whose
capacity for deception has long been demonstrated by his high regard for
himself, has a new book out claiming that conservatives have abandoned the
Goldwater tradition. He recently wrote, "For more than 40 years I have
considered myself a ŒGoldwater conservative,' and am thoroughly familiar
with the movement's canon." The Bush-Cheney White House, Dean assures us,
has betrayed the Goldwater tradition: "Bible-thumping, finger-pointing,
tongue-lashing attacks on homosexuals are not found in Russell Kirk's
classic conservative canons, nor in James Burnham's guides to conservative
governing."

Where Dean isn't dishonest - pray tell, what was the last tongue-lashing
attack on homosexuals issued from this administration? - he's flatly
ignorant.

But don't tell that to Goldwater's own granddaughter, who has a made a
documentary for HBO about Grandpa AuH2O that, judging from its press,
portrays him as some sort of Bill Maher with cowboy boots. The New York
Times says the film "rehabilitates (Goldwater) as a kind of liberal." The
Times says his rehabilitation - nothing loaded about that word - hinges on
his belief that "government should stay out of our hair."

Of course, when liberals say government should stay out of our hair, they
mean Uncle Sam should offer an open bar on abortions and gay marriage
licenses. Beyond that, everything's fair game. How else to explain the fact
that Ms. Goldwater interviews Ted Kennedy, Al Franken, Hillary Clinton and
James Carville - people who support nationalized health care, smoking bans,
gun control, hate-crime laws and other libertarian wolfsbane - to testify
about Goldwater's libertarian enlightenment.

Truthfully, Goldwater himself is partly to blame for this nonsense. As he
got older, "Mr. Conservative" became more libertarian on some social issues
(largely due to his wife's influence and his understandable personal
distaste for some Christian right leaders). But even so, Goldwater only
abandoned his support for a constitutional ban on abortion in his final term
in the Senate and didn't change his opposition to gay rights until long
after he retired.

Meanwhile, as Andrew Busch details in "The Goldwater Myth" (winter 2005
issue of the Claremont Review of Books), the Goldwater of 1964 was the
founding father of today's social conservatism. Virtually all of the leaders
of the "New Right" - including Phyllis Schlafly - were veterans of the
Goldwater movement. L. Brent Bozell, the ghostwriter of Goldwater's 1960
classic "The Conscience of a Conservative" - in which they wrote "The laws
of God, and of nature, have no dateline" - was a pioneering "theocratic"
intellectual.

Theodore White, that great (liberal) chronicler of American politics, wrote
in his 1964 classic "The Making of the President" that Goldwater's "greatest
contribution to American politics" was the legitimization of what Goldwater
called "the moral issue": "This will be his great credit in historical
terms: that finally he introduced the condition and quality of American
morality and life as a subject of political debate."

White couldn't have known in 1964 that Goldwater's contribution would be
even greater than that. Nonetheless, Goldwater was rewarded for his efforts
with denunciations and slander. LBJ vilified his 1964 opponent as an avatar
of hate. Today, the Times calls him "a half-Jewish cowboy from Phoenix." In
the '60s, the entire liberal establishment smeared Goldwater as a
crypto-Nazi. "We see dangerous signs of Hitlerism in the Goldwater
campaign," Martin Luther King ludicrously warned.

Liberals, of course, have an inexhaustible capacity to lecture conservatives
about what "real" conservatism is. Still, what confuses many people is this
idea that social conservatism and small-government conservatism are
inherently at odds. They surely can be - and I'd love for this
administration to channel more of Goldwater's libertarian sentiments. But
Goldwater understood something this crowd doesn't. "It is impossible to
maintain freedom and order and justice," he declared in 1964, "without
religious and moral sanctions."